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The Mist, a “sentimental construction,” was workshopped between 52 collaborators from the SenseLab in the forests north of Montreal. Our environmental installation was approximately 45 x 6 meters of rope, rocks, mosquito netting, cable ties, pulleys and tape, all stretched across Mekoos lake. Its form responds to wind and light, and reflections and ripples in the water. Depending on the time of day, and proximity to The Mist – most traveled to it in boats – it waivers between appearing as a bridge, as haze, or as mirrored water from below.

The Mist

site-conditioned installation / public intervention, July 2011

A third sentimental construction, The Mist was workshopped along with 51 collaborators from the Sense Lab in the forests north of Montreal. Each “construction” is a large-scale, site-conditioned intervention made of minimal materials and performed in public space. For the event, “Generating the Impossible,” our group worked to re-conceive of what sentiments and constructions are, and how we and they might be introduced and activated, together. Our eventual environmental installation was approximately 45 x 6 meters of rope, rocks, mosquito netting, cable ties, pulleys and tape, all stretched across Mekoos lake. Its form responds to wind and light, and reflections and ripples in the water. Depending on the time of day, and proximity to The Mist – most travelled to it in boats – it waivers between appearing as a bridge, as haze, or as mirrored water from below. The Mist was later brought back to the city, and performed twice in Outremont, Montreal.

The first two sentimental constructions were publicly performed architectural structures made of rope. Each twists the idea of ‘public space’ by its double activation: first, through the volunteers who stretch its form outward and around them; and second, through the communal play of the onlookers-turned-participants, who give the structure an/other performative turn. For Generating the Impossible, these were taken as a proposition in form and concept, as ephemeral arrangements that carve out space and frame their contexts. The Mist, like its predecessors, is ‘sentimental’ in the tensions it creates between nostalgia and possibility, construction and emergence, the pre-formed and the per-formed.